How much does international trade affect business cycle synchronization ?
Author InfoWilliam C. Gruben Jahyeong Koo Eric Millis Abstract In a recent article, Jeffrey Frankel and Andrew Rose (1998) examine the hypothesis that greater trade flows between two countries cause greater synchronicity between their business cycles. The increase in business cycle synchronicity may be seen as rationalizing a common monetary policy and, so, a shared currency. Arguing that product specialization would lower the synchronicity of business cycles, Frankel and Rose posit that a regression of output correlation on overall trade will indicate whether (positive) common demand shocks and productivity spillovers dominate or (negative) specialization effects do. The authors apply instrumental variables to confirm a causal relationship. In this paper, we refine the estimation in two ways. First, we test for instrument validity and find that the confirming null hypothesis is rejected in most cases. We find evidence to suggest that the instrumental variables method applied is inappr
